Alexander Luria
Alexander Romanovich Luria was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology. He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological tests during his clinical work with brain-injured victims of World War II, which are still used in various forms. He made an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions and integrative processes of the brain in general. Luria's magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man, is a much-used psychological textbook which has been translated into many languages and which he supplemented with The Working Brain in 1973.
It is less known that Luria's main interests, before the war, were in the field of cultural and developmental research in psychology. He became famous for his studies of low-educated populations of nomadic Uzbeks in the Uzbek SSR arguing that they demonstrate different psychological performance from their contemporaries and compatriots under the economically more developed conditions of socialist collective farming. He was one of the founders of cultural-historical psychology and a colleague of Lev Vygotsky. Apart from his work with Vygotsky, Luria is widely known for two extraordinary psychological case studies: The Mind of a Mnemonist, about Solomon Shereshevsky, who had highly advanced memory; and The Man with a Shattered World, about Lev Zasetsky, a man with a severe traumatic brain injury.
During his career Luria worked in a wide range of scientific fields at such institutions as the Academy of Communist Education, Experimental Defectological Institute, Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy, All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, and the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Luria as the 69th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Life and career
Early life and childhood
Luria was born on 16 July 1902, to Jewish parents in Kazan, a regional centre east of Moscow. Many of his family were in medicine. According to Luria's biographer Evgenia Homskaya, his father, Roman Albertovich Luria was a therapist who "worked as a professor at the University of Kazan; and after the Russian Revolution, he became a founder and chief of the Kazan Institute of Advanced Medical Education." Two monographs of his father's writings were published in Russian under the titles, Stomach and Gullet Illnesses and Inside Look at Illness and Gastrogenic Diseases. His mother, Evgenia Viktorovna, became a practicing dentist after finishing college in Poland. Luria was one of two children; his younger sister Lydia became a practicing psychiatrist.Early education and move to Moscow
Luria finished school ahead of schedule and completed his first degree in 1921 at Kazan State University. While still a student in Kazan, he established the Kazan Psychoanalytic Society and briefly exchanged letters with Sigmund Freud. Late in 1923, he moved to Moscow, where he lived on Arbat Street. His parents later followed him and settled down nearby. In Moscow, Luria was offered a position at the Moscow State Institute of Experimental Psychology, run from November 1923 by Konstantin Kornilov.In 1924, Luria met Lev Vygotsky, who would influence him greatly. The union of the two psychologists gave birth to what subsequently was termed the Vygotsky, or more precisely, the Vygotsky–Luria Circle. During the 1920s Luria also met a large number of scholars, including Aleksei Leontiev, Mark Lebedinsky, Alexander Zaporozhets, Bluma Zeigarnik, many of whom would remain his lifelong colleagues. Following Vygotsky and along with him, in mid-1920s Luria launched a project of developing a psychology of a radically new kind. This approach fused "cultural", "historical", and "instrumental" psychology and is most commonly referred to presently as cultural-historical psychology. It emphasizes the mediatory role of culture, particularly language, in the development of higher psychological functions in ontogeny and phylogeny.
Independently of Vygotsky, Luria developed the ingenious "combined motor method", which helped diagnose individuals' hidden or subdued emotional and thought processes. This research was published in the US in 1932 as The Nature of Human Conflicts and made him internationally famous as one of the leading psychologists in Soviet Russia. In 1937, Luria submitted the manuscript in Russian and defended it as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Tbilisi.
Luria wrote three books during the 1920s after moving to Moscow, The Nature of Human Conflicts, Speech and Intellect in Child Development, and Speech and Intellect of Urban, Rural and Homeless Children. The second title came out in 1928, while the other two were published in the 1930s.
In early 1930s both Luria and Vygotsky started their medical studies in Kharkiv, then, after Vygotsky's death in 1934, Luria completed his medical education at 1st Moscow Medical Institute.
Multiculturalism and neurology
The 1930s were significant to Luria because his studies of indigenous people opened the field of multiculturalism to his general interests. This interest would be revived in the later twentieth century by a variety of scholars and researchers who began studying and defending indigenous peoples throughout the world. Luria's work continued in this field with expeditions to Central Asia. Under the supervision of Vygotsky, Luria investigated various psychological changes that take place as a result of cultural development of undereducated minorities. In this regard he has been credited with a major contribution to the study of orality.In response to Lysenkoism's purge of geneticists, Luria decided to pursue a physician degree, which he completed with honors in the summer of 1937. After rewriting and reorganizing his manuscript for The Nature of Human Conflicts, he defended it for a doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Tbilisi in 1937, and was appointed Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences. "At the age of thirty-four, he was one of the youngest professors of psychology in the country." In 1933, Luria married Lana P. Lipchina, a well-known specialist in microbiology with a doctorate in the biological sciences. The couple lived in Moscow on Frunze Street, where their only daughter Lena was born.
Luria also studied identical and fraternal twins in large residential schools to determine the interplay of various factors of cultural and genetic human development. In his early neuropsychological work in the end of the 1930s as well as throughout his postwar academic life he focused on the study of aphasia, focusing on the relation between language, thought, and cortical functions, particularly on the development of compensatory functions for aphasia.
World War II and aftermath
For Luria, the war with Germany that ended in 1945 resulted in a number of significant developments for the future of his career in neuropsychology. He was appointed Doctor of Medical Sciences in 1943 and Professor in 1944. Of specific importance for Luria was that he was assigned by the government to care for nearly 800 hospitalized patients with traumatic brain injury caused by the war. Luria's treatment methods dealt with a wide range of emotional and intellectual dysfunctions. He kept meticulous notes on these patients, and discerned from them three possibilities for functional recovery: " disinhibition of a temporarily blocked function; involvement of the vicarious potential of the opposite hemisphere; and reorganization of the function system", which he described in a book titled Functional Recovery From Military Brain Wounds, A second book titled Traumatic Aphasia was written in 1947 in which "Luria formulated an original conception of the neural organization of speech and its disorders that differed significantly from the existing western conceptions about aphasia." Soon after the end of the war, Luria was assigned a permanent position in General Psychology at the central Moscow State University in General Psychology, where he would predominantly stay for the remainder of his life; he was instrumental in the foundation of the Faculty of Psychology, and later headed the Departments of Patho- and Neuropsychology. By 1946, his father, the chief of the gastroenterological clinics at Botkin Hospital, had died of stomach cancer. His mother survived several more years, dying in 1950.1950s
Following the war, Luria continued his work in Moscow's Institute of Psychology. For a period of time he was removed from the Institute of Psychology, and in the 1950s he shifted to research on intellectually disabled children at the Defectological Institute. Here he did his most pioneering research in child psychology, and was able to permanently disassociate himself from the influence that was then still exerted in the Soviet Union by Pavlov's early research. Luria said publicly that his own interests were limited to a specific examination of "Pavlov's second signal system" and did not concern Pavlov's simplified primary explanation of human behavior as based on a "conditioned reflex by means of positive reinforcement". Luria's continued interest in the regulative function of speech was further revisited in the mid-1950s and was summarized in his 1957 monograph titled The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and Abnormal Behavior. In this book Luria summarized his principal concerns in this field through three succinct points summarized by Homskaya as: " the role of speech in the development of mental processes; the development of the regulative function of speech; and changes in the regulative functions of speech caused by various brain pathologies."Luria's main contributions to child psychology during the 1950s are well summarized by the research collected in a two-volume compendium of collected research published in Moscow in 1956 and 1958 under the title of Problems of Higher Nervous System Activity in Normal and Anomalous Children. Homskaya summarizes Luria's approach as centering on: "The application of the Method of Motor Associations allowed investigators to reveal difficulties experienced by children in the process of forming conditioned links as well as restructuring and compensating by means of speech... children demonstrated acute dysfunction of the generalizing and regulating functions of speech." Taking this direction, already by the mid-1950s, "Luria for the first time proposed his ideas about the differences of neurodynamic processes in different functional systems, primarily in verbal and motor systems." Luria identified the three stages of language development in children in terms of "the formation of the mechanisms of voluntary actions: actions in the absence of a regulative verbal influence, actions with a nonspecific influence, and, finally, actions with a selective verbal influence." For Luria, "The regulating function of speech thus appears as a main factor in the formation of voluntary behavior ... at first, the activating function is formed, and then the inhibitory, regulatory function."